The administration of juvenile justice has been
reformed significantly in the State of Ohio over
the past 3 years. The primary reform initiative, the
RECLAIM (Reasoned and Equitable Community and Local Alternatives to the Incarceration of
Minors) Ohio program, provides for a community-based response to the problem of youth
delinquency through the establishment of local, graduated
sanctions programs. This initiative, coupled with the
Ohio Families and Children First initiative (OF & CF)
(a collaborative effort among all State agencies
concerned with family and children's issues to
support local youth-serving programs) and amended
substitute H.R. 1340 from the 1995 legislative
session (which provides for more adult sanctions for
serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders),
completes the continuum of juvenile justice policy and
service delivery in the State.

RECLAIM Ohio, which was implemented statewide in 1995, has served to remedy
the previously strained relations between the Ohio Department of
Youth Services (DYS) and local juvenile court judges
by creating shared ownership and responsibility for
the administration of juvenile justice in Ohio.

Today, RECLAIM Ohio is well received by local courts and appears to be working. A fiscal year
1996 program overview indicates that admissions to
DYS decreased 4 percent compared with fiscal year 1995 and more
than 10,400 youth were served by
community-based programs administered by local juvenile courts and funded with RECLAIM
Ohio appropriations.341

RECLAIM Ohio evolved from Governor George Voinovich's dedication to building families and
investing in children. The OF & CF helps
facilitate children's readiness for learning. The program,
a predecessor of RECLAIM Ohio, places a policy and funding emphasis on prevention and early
intervention activities that will minimize the need for
more costly efforts later, according to an Ohio
annual progress report.342

With this more preventive component in place,
RECLAIM Ohio was developed to facilitate a similar
community response for a different set of
juveniles -- youth already in trouble with the law.
RECLAIM Ohio is a unique program that enables local
juvenile courts to respond immediately and effectively
to youth misbehavior by developing their own local community-based disposition programs or
contracting with private and nonprofit organizations to
establish them. RECLAIM Ohio was piloted in 9 Ohio counties in 1994 and became available to all
88 of Ohio's counties in January 1995.

Several factors led to the enactment of the
RECLAIM Ohio legislation in 1993. Prior to the development
of the program, DYS, which manages the State's juvenile corrections facilities, was allocated
separate funding for the juvenile institutions it
managed. County judges, often faced with pressure from
their limited local budgets, thought committing a youth
to a DYS secure facility was free, since sending
youth to the State juvenile prison system came at no cost
to the county. Thus, there was a fiscal incentive
in place to commit youth to secure juvenile facilities,
no matter how nonviolent the crime for which they
had been adjudicated. According to a RECLAIM
Ohio program overview, "It was becoming readily
apparent that many of the youth committed to DYS
[secure facilities]particularly first-time,
nonviolent offenders -- would be better served in their
local communities."343

This sentencing trend helped contribute to
significant crowding in juvenile institutions around
the State. As of May 1992, the population of juveniles
in secure youth facilities had significantly exceeded
the design capacity of the facilities. According to a
State official, the population of youth offenders in
DYS custody was 2,538, greatly surpassing the
facilities' design capacity of 1,400.344

The overcrowded conditions created a dangerous situation for both residents and staff. Youth in
DYS custody were getting hurt, and one female staff
person was nearly killed. These and other
unfortunate incidents caught the attention of the local
press, whose reporting helped bring the issue to the
public's attention. Voinovich named then-Lieutenant
Governor Michael DeWine, now one of Ohio's U.S.
Senators, to lead a task force to investigate the
problem.345

The end result was RECLAIM Ohio, a collaborative, bipartisan effort developed by DeWine;
Geno Natalucci-Persichetti, DYS' director; and
Carol Rapp Zimmermann, DYS' assistant director,
with financial and ideological support from
Voinovich. According to a consultant for RECLAIM
Ohio, "Governor Voinovich bought into RECLAIM
Ohio 100 percent and put in some serious money. He
and Geno Persichetti were very progressive to
acknowledge kids were coming out worse from State
institutions, and many less serious offenders would
be better off in corrections programs at home than
being locked up with hardened
delinquents."346

Under the program, counties receive a funding
allocation based on the number of youth adjudicated
for acts in the previous 4 years that would have
been felonies if committed by adults. Each month,
a county's allocation is charged 75 percent of the
daily costs for youth housed in secure DYS
institutions and 50 percent of the daily costs for youth placed
in DYS community corrections facilities. Community corrections facilities are State-funded, locally
operated, dispositional alternatives for juvenile
offenders who commit acts that would be considered
felonies if committed by adults and who are in need of
treatment in a residential facility but whose offenses
do not warrant a long-term commitment to a secure DYS facility.

DYS rebates the remainder of the allocation,
after the debits, to the counties each month. With
those funds, counties contract for or develop
community-based programs for youth adjudicated
delinquent who would have otherwise been committed to
DYS facilities. Examples of the 279 programs in place
in Ohio counties include day treatment, intensive
probation, electronic monitoring, home-based
services, offense-specific programs, residential treatment,
and reintegration or transitional programs. The
only current limitations on the use of RECLAIM
Ohio funds are that they must be funneled into
programs serving youth who have been before the
juvenile courts and that they cannot be used for
construction, renovation, or supplanting local
funds.348

To ensure public safety, DYS guarantees that
the juvenile court may commit violent youth to DYS secure facilities even if that county has exhausted
its RECLAIM Ohio allocation. This "hold
harmless" clause guarantees that the juvenile courts will
not have to use local funds to house more violent
youth who belong in secure custody. In addition,
RECLAIM Ohio includes a provision for "public safety
beds" for which counties are not debited. As a result,
the counties are not charged against their RECLAIM Ohio allocation for youth committed to DYS
for enumerated violent crimes, such as murder,
rape, manslaughter, and certain firearms offenses.

Reform Strategy. Under the RECLAIM Ohio
program, the responsibility for crowding in
juvenile facilities and the delivery of services to
delinquent youth is not a State or a local problem but a
systems challenge. The developers of RECLAIM Ohio
soon realized that communities lacked resources to
treat some juvenile offenders locally with appropriate
and cost-effective services. At the same time, DYS
found it could not provide all of the services necessary
to accommodate the entire range of offenders in its
16 secure facilities.349
By recreating the process
by which juvenile sanctions are funded, RECLAIM Ohio has achieved its goal of allowing local
juvenile courts to design juvenile corrections to fit
community needs. DYS benefited as well from the
creation of environments that best serve young offenders.

The impetus behind the reform had a historical
base in the stormy relationship between many Ohio
juvenile court judges and DYS. When DYS came into existence in 1980, replacing the Ohio Commission
of Youth Services, Ohio juvenile court judges
lobbied for more control of community-based programs
and sanctions for status offenders. Thus, the DYS
purview initially was limited to handling only
juvenile felons, with statutory provisions in place
dictating the minimum sentences they were required to
serve. This loss of State agency control stemmed from
a lack of confidence on the part of juvenile judges
in DYS's ability to manage.350

However, DYS controlled the money for community corrections -- the appropriation was funneled
directly to the agency, which then allocated the
money to the counties. The relationship was
adversarial, and there was continuing conflict over
appropriations. Local judges wanted more money to
send more juveniles to community corrections
programs, but commitments to DYS had increased and
the staff needed those funds to operate the secure
facilities appropriately. This adversarial relationship
left both sides frustrated, with neither taking
ownership of the problem.

In May 1992, when facilities were populated at
180 percent of design capacity, with no end to these
levels in sight, and with 1 in every 90
African-American youth in Ohio being committed to DYS
facilities,351
those concerned with the administration of
juvenile justice in the State knew it was time to take
action. Governor Voinovich encouraged DYS officials
to begin a dialog with juvenile judges over
developing a collaborative approach to the care, treatment,
and sanctioning of delinquents. At that point, an
informal dialog began between DYS officials and
judges in some counties. At the same time, DYS started
to review the efforts of other States to implement
juvenile justice reform initiatives. DYS also tried to
develop ways of incorporating the positive aspects
of other programs into one that would meet the
needs of Ohioans while avoiding the obstacles and
unintended consequences that had emerged in other jurisdictions.

What resulted was RECLAIM Ohio, with a market-driven company (DYS) providing a service to
its customers (the juvenile court judges). The DYS budget was aggregated and State officials then
distributed essentially all of the appropriation to
the counties. By framing the issue in economic
terms and deferring significant programmatic control
and funding to the local level, the RECLAIM Ohio
proposal seemed like a clear choice for investing in
the youth of the State.

Despite the plan's additional expense and the
uncertainty of how the approach would work in
practice, Governor Voinovich supported the
revolutionary initiative for several reasons. According to a
DYS official, the Governor understood the seriousness
of failing to make a sweeping change to the
juvenile justice system; he also recognized that building
more and more juvenile facilities was not an
appropriate long-term answer. Perhaps an even greater
influence, according to the official, was the
Governor's pledge to help Ohio's children, which served as
the catalyst for his support.352

The proposal put forth by the Voinovich
administration gained significant bipartisan support as
it moved through the legislature as part of the
1993 budget plan, and it did not go through
significant revision during the legislative process.
Legislators were concerned about the efficacy of the
juvenile justice system and were dedicated to
effecting change in the lives of these young people.
Further, the DYS proposal had created an accountable
system using a simple formula and "clean
data"the number of youth adjudicated for acts that
would have been felonies if committed by adults -- and
this information was to be compiled by the
counties themselves. Yet another selling point to the
legislature was giving power and funding to local
juvenile courts, with a good-faith effort to keep a
primary component of the administration of juvenile
justice at the county level. A DYS official characterized
the decision to embrace RECLAIM Ohio as a
skillful, strategic choice for public peace.353

The unions supported the initiative, which was
critical to the passage of the measure. The labor
representatives understood that RECLAIM Ohio did
not represent an effort by DYS to downsize staff
positions; rather, a higher staff-to-offender ratio
would come about as a result of less crowded
conditions. This served the union's interest by ensuring safe
working conditions in secure institutions. Thus,
labor supported the allocation of money to the
counties because it understood that its interests were
protected overall.354

Even though DYS had been soliciting input from juvenile court judges while the program was
being developed, some remained opposed to the plan.
A few local judges wanted to be trusted to make
the right decisions for the youth who came before
them and advocated for a shift of funds with no other
ties. However, a majority of the county courts came
out in full support of the program and praised the
initiative for giving local courts the fiscal power to
support sanctioning and treatment decisions based
on the needs of the communities they serve. Today,
an overwhelming majority of Ohio's juvenile courts strongly support the RECLAIM Ohio initiative
and the transfer of decisionmaking power to local
judges, despite the additional time and work involved
in developing a comprehensive plan for juvenile
services and sanctions options.355

A recently released study conducted by the
University of Cincinnati, which evaluated the nine
county programs that participated in the 1994 pilot
of RECLAIM Ohio, found that 85 percent of county court judges, administrators, and probation
officials were very satisfied with their experiences as
pilot program participants. What the respondents
liked most about participating in the pilot program
was the ability to develop alternative ways of
dealing with delinquent youth.356
This enthusiasm and
support for the program's first run spread to
other counties, many of which embraced RECLAIM
Ohio as soon it was available statewide in January 1995.

Another strong inducement for many county
courts to participate was the financial incentives built
into the program's debiting system. Before RECLAIM Ohio, local courts were appropriated funds for
community corrections under the Community Corrections Grants program, which allocated $6 million
to counties for community corrections. In fiscal
year 1996, juvenile courts received $17.1 million
after they paid their debits for DYS commitments -- nearly three times the amount of State money
previously channeled to the juvenile courts.357

In an effort to sustain the momentum and
positive feedback surrounding RECLAIM Ohio, DYS
has adopted a customer service-oriented approach
to maintaining its relationships with the local courts.
A RECLAIM Ohio conference is held every year, and program meetings occur every other month for
all counties that wish to participate. Both venues
offer an opportunity for RECLAIM Ohio participants
to discuss successes and challenges in the
program's implementation.358

Further, DYS officials spend a significant amount
of time in the field, offering counties technical
assistance with the administration of their programs.
DYS
officials hope that these meetings and outreach
efforts will lead to the preservation and sustainability
of RECLAIM Ohio and facilitate a continued
positive relationship with local court judges and
administrators.359

A more accurate picture of the efforts of State
and local officials and community service providers
will be presented by a statewide analysis by the
University of Cincinnati to elicit information on the
status of the program in all 88 Ohio counties. Further,
the study will look longitudinally at the impact of
the program by tracking youth sentenced to various community sanctions, gauging their readjustment
in their own communities, and measuring the rates
of recidivism of RECLAIM Ohio participants.

Since the introduction of RECLAIM Ohio, DYS officials have seen decreased institutional
populations and a greater opportunity to address
treatment issues for youth in need. However, the best
result, according to officials, is the shared effort in
reclaiming delinquent children among the juvenile
courts, DYS, and other State agencies. This newly
created vision would have been unimaginable 5 years
ago, officials report.360

Amended substitute H.R. 1, sponsored by
Representative E.J. Thomas, was enacted to serve two
purposes: to send a clear and powerful message to
youth across Ohio that heinous and repeat violent
offenses will not be tolerated in the State and to seek
justice for the victims of juvenile crime and their
families.361

H.R. 1 started as a reverse waiver provision,
under which juveniles transferred to adult criminal
court could petition the court to be certified back to
the juvenile court. The youth had the burden of
proving why he or she should be adjudicated in
juvenile court. When DYS realized that RECLAIM
Ohio and local jurisdictions could be adversely affected
by some of these early H.R. 1 provisions, the
agency participated in a collaborative effort to limit
transfers to adult criminal court to habitual and
violent offenders only. As a result, the Senate
Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on
Judiciary and Criminal Justice held hearings and facilitated
a working group composed of interested parties, including State legislators, prosecutors, juvenile
and adult court judges, law enforcement officials,
the State attorney general, and DYS.362

The law, as it was enacted, makes significant
changes to transfer provisions by which violent juveniles
in Ohio are tried as adult criminals. The law
defines category 1 and category 2 violent offenses as
they relate to juveniles. Category 1 offenses include
aggravated murder, attempted aggravated murder, and attempted murder. Category 2 offenses
include kidnaping; rape; voluntary manslaughter;
involuntary manslaughter; felonious sexual penetration;
and aggravated arson, robbery, and
burglary.363
The definition of "public safety bed" was amended
to include all category 1 and 2 offenses, with the
exception of aggravated robbery and burglary.

The law also created a mandatory bindover
or waiver provision for violent youth. Juveniles
must now be tried in adult criminal court when there
is probable cause to believe that:

A youth 14 years old or older has committed
a criminal offense and has previously been found
or pleaded guilty to a felony-level offense in
adult court.

A youth 14 years old or older has committed
a criminal offense and is a resident of another
State where he or she would be considered an adult
for that offense.

A youth 16 or 17 years old has been charged
with a category 1 offense.

A youth 14 or 15 years old has committed a
category 1 offense and has previously been committed to DYS for a category 1 or 2 level offense.

A youth 16 or 17 years old has committed a
category 1 or 2 offense other than kidnaping and
has previously been committed to DYS for a
category 1 or 2 offense.

The discretionary waiver provisions were
expanded to permit the transfer of 14-year-olds who have
committed acts that would have been felonies if
committed by an adult if the victim was 5 years old or
younger or 65 years old or older. Additional
considerations include whether the juvenile alleged to have
committed the offense physically harmed or injured
the victim, possessed a firearm when allegedly
committing the offense, or failed to successfully
complete previous attempts at rehabilitation.

Minimum sentences for violent youth who remain
in the custody of DYS were added as a result of
the amended substitute H.R. 1. Youth committing attempted aggravated murder or attempted
murder will serve a 6- to 7-year DYS commitment,
while those committing a category 2 offense will be
required to serve 1 to 3 years. Juveniles
committing crimes while brandishing guns will receive a
3-year minimum sentence, while those who have a
firearm in their possession during the commission of a
crime will serve at least 1 year. Finally, the act lowers to
14 the age of youth adjudicated delinquent for a
category 1 or 2 offense who may be photographed
and fingerprinted.

The passage of amended substitute H.R. 1 represents the "best judicial practice and
temperament."365
It provides serious sanctions for violent offenses
that most participants agreed were best handled
with tough sanctions. The definitions for category 1 and
2 offenses were of the type that DYS would have
previously tied to public safety beds and thus did
not affect the formula for the county allocation.
The interested parties worked together to identify
offenses that all could agree belonged in the
definition of public safety beds.

Amended substitute H.R. 1 will have a long-term affect on RECLAIM Ohio. By sending older,
more violent juveniles to the adult system, DYS will
house younger delinquents who will have longer
minimum sentences to serve. DYS officials expect this shift
to happen slowly, and when it does, they
acknowledge a likely need to build additional juvenile
facilities based on the prototype and the needs of the
offenders committed to DYS custody at that time.